Archives de catégorie : Literary

THE STORYTELLER de Faiqa Mansab

Healing generational trauma through storytelling and solving the mystery of three murders.

THE STORYTELLER
by Faiqa Mansab
Neem Tree Press, June 2024
(via Randle Editorial & Literary Consultancy)

Layla, a scholar of stories, lives a quiet, predictable life until one day she finds a dead woman in her library.

Mira is a renowned storyteller. When a corpse turns up in a red cloak with a note to her from the murderer, she must join forces with Layla and enter the realm of Story for answers in a bid to save herself and her daughter.

This novel is immersed in Sufi literature, Sufi storytelling techniques and fairy tales, but at its heart it is a murder mystery. The story is set in the U.S. and is also about the wounded relationship of a mother and daughter, how they heal their relationship while they solve the murders with the help of fairy tales retold, and old secret Sufi stories. It is Elif Shafak’s Forty Rules of Love meets Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.

THE STORYTELLER explores the healing of wounded motherdaughter relationships through the magic of Sufi storytelling.

Faiqa Mansab is a Pakistani writer. She holds an Mphil in English Literature, an MFA in creative writing with a high distinction from Kingston University London and an MA in Gender and Cultural Studies from Birkbeck University London. She has written and continues to write for numerous publications both local and international. Her debut novel This House of Clay and Water (2017) was longlisted for Getz Pharma Fiction Prize and the German Consulate Peace Prize at the Karachi Literature Festival 2018. Faiqa lives in Lahore with her family. Faiqa is agented by Annette Crossland at A for Authors LitAg.

ON HER OWN de Lihi Lapid

A moving, page-turning story of two families in crisis that melds the clock-ticking tension of Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me with the “issue-driven” gravity of Jennifer Haigh’s Mercy Street.

ON HER OWN
by Lihi Lapid, translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverton
HarperVia, March 2024

Watching her Russian immigrant mother, Irina, struggle to put food on the table, Nina, a beautiful and restless teenager, vows her life will be different. When a strapping older man in a fancy car appears at school one day offering her luxuries her single mother cannot afford, Nina believes he’s her ticket out of her dumpy little town. Ignoring the danger signs and her mother’s constant pleas—which end in exhausting screaming matches—she packs a suitcase and leaves home after one last fight.

Ten days later, a terrified Nina, her dress torn, is hiding in the stairwell of a Tel Aviv apartment after witnessing a murder she cannot talk about. She is discovered by one of the building’s tenants, a confused, lonely old widow who mistakes her for the granddaughter she hasn’t seen for a long while, not since her son moved his family to America. “You’ve come back to me, Dana’le.” Instead of correcting the mistake, the desperate Nina jumps at the chance for a place to hide.

Hiding from her mother and the dangerous man who are both frantically searching for her, Nina settles into the old woman’s apartment. But how long can Nina possibly hide out until the poor woman realizes she’s not who she says she is, or before someone else – her homesick son in America who keeps calling, or the lovely local neighbors who drop by with groceries—catches on?

Set between the eve of Passover and Israel’s Independence Day, On Her Own is a tense and immersive psychological read about two families looking for redemption, the transformative bonds between strangers, and the unexpected places from which love can grow.

Lihi Lapid is a bestselling Israeli author, photojournalist, columnist, and activist. She lives in Tel Aviv with her husband Yair Lapid, the former Prime Minister of Israel, and their two children. This is her third novel.

LUCKY de Jane Smiley

From the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, a soaring, soulful novel for readers of Daisy Jones and The Six about a folk musician who rises to fame across our changing times.

LUCKY
by Jane Smiley
Knopf, April 2024)
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Before Jodie Rattler became a folk sensation, she was just a little girl who struck lucky at a racetrack. That roll of two-dollar bills she won has never left her side since. Jodie comes of age in recording studios, backstage, and on tour, and tries to hold her own in the wake of Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, and Joni Mitchell. Yet it feels like something is missing.

Full of atmosphere, shot through with longing and exuberance, romance and rock’n’roll, Lucky is a colorful portrait of one woman’s journey in search of herself.

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous novels, including A Thousand Acres, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and most recently, Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she has also received the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature. She lives in Northern California.

MY NAME IS IRIS de Brando Skyhorse

Brando Skyhorse, the PEN/Hemingway Award–winning author of The Madonnas of Echo Park, returns with a riveting literary dystopian novel set in a near-future America where mandatory identification wristbands make second-generation immigrants into second-class citizens—a powerful family saga for readers of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind.

MY NAME IS IRIS
by Brando Skyhorse
Avid Reader, May 2023
(via Writers House)

One day, Iris Prince, a middle-class, ideologically conservative Mexican American mother and wife, finds a mysterious wall growing outside her modest Southern California home. In addition to the maddening structure—which is impossible to remove and mutates at random—the rest of the world is also changing. A newly passed law suddenly denies basic rights like drivers’ licenses and steady employment to Americans who cannot prove at least one of their parents was born in the United States. Biometric wristbands are used to identify people who are “of verifiable origin” under the new system, while unverifiables are ignored or harassed with abandon.

Iris has always prided herself on being a model minority and assimilating into White American culture. She and her like-minded Mexican American husband Alex have raised their daughter Melanie to be bilingual, but there are strict rules about when Spanish is and isn’t acceptable, and about what other parts of their culture to selectively embrace. As Alex’s behavior becomes suspicious, Iris soon realizes she may not be eligible for the coveted wristband—at least not without going to dangerous, drastic lengths to get one. Meanwhile, the wall outside their home is growing, and their neighbors are watching more closely than ever…

A powerful story about family, identity, intolerance, and immigration, MY NAME IS IRIS is a brilliant and timely look at what it means to be American as seen through one woman’s tumultuous journey through a world that insists on telling her who she can and can’t be.

Brando Skyhorse’s debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, won the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His memoir, Take This Man, was named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2014 and one of NBC News’s 10 Best Latino Books of 2014. Skyhorse is a graduate of Stanford University and the MFA Writers’ Workshop program at UC Irvine.

THE DEGENERATES de Raeden Richardson

Composed in propulsive, layered prose, THE DEGENERATES shatters conventional narratives and pays tribute to those characters often lost in the margins.

THE DEGENERATES
by Raeden Richardson
Text Publishing:, January 2025
(via Writers House)

THE DEGENERATES is a spiritual novel for the twenty-first century following the interconnected lives of four characters: Somnath, a humble, Bombayite shoeshiner subject to a government-enforced sterilization in 1975; Titch, a working-class Australian teenager left grieving after his soulmate live-streams his suicide; and Ginny, a prodigious young woman propelled to Brooklyn to make a new life and escape her cruel family. At the heart of the novel, Maha Sonpate waits in an illegal underground garage, listening to the tales of these and other outcasts who wander the streets of Melbourne. As she collects the nightmarish histories of her followers, wrestling with her paradoxical role as both writer and reader, Maha journeys to The Red Plains, a surrealist landscape on the fringes of suburbia, and writes until the edge of language where reality itself begins to dissolve.

THE DEGENERATES contends with contemporary tragedies—the sorrow of displacement, the addictive allure of cryptocurrencies, the longing for a home beyond the banality of the suburbs—and finds love in its most timeless form. Bridging Australia, India and the United States, the novel blends the holy with the base, grappling with the realities of modern loneliness and every form of departure—from our homes, from our families and even from life itself.

“THE DEGENERATES so radiates with vitality that one feels as if its pages are somehow emitting the material of real life. This extraordinary novel is as much a story — one that is simultaneously entertaining and purposeful — as an argument for the value of storytelling itself.” —Vauhini Vara, author of The Immortal King Rao

“It’s rare to find a novel that moves as confidently yet unpredictably as THE DEGENERATES. Raeden Richardson writes like a composer scoring a symphony, with such grace, fluidity, and musical control you almost feel you can see the notes rising off the page. Each of his characters possesses a wholly unique interiority, and through their minds, he communicates a vision of a world in which dissolution and creation—the degenerative and the regenerative—are inseparable from each other.” —Kevin Brockmeier, author of Things That Fall from the Sky

Raeden Richardson is an Indian-Australian writer raised in Melbourne and has lived in Singapore and New York. He is a graduate of Yale-NUS College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has received support from the American Australian Association, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Ian Potter Cultural Trust and the John Anson Kittredge Fund. He has taught Creative Writing at The University of Iowa and the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Masters Review, Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings, Strangely Enough and New Australian Fiction.